The general consensus among professional internet marketers contends that .edu and .gov links carry addition weight compared to ordinary .com links.  It’s easy to see why search engines trust these types of sites given their increased authority.  The goal here is to participate in blogs and forums to increase your backlinks and thus your ranking.  In this post I’ll be covering the relevant challenges, tips and benefits to .gov blog commenting.

The general consensus among professional internet marketers contends that .edu and .gov links carry addition weight compared to ordinary .com links.  It’s easy to see why search engines trust these types of sites given their increased authority.  The goal here is to participate in blogs and forums to increase your backlinks and thus your ranking.  In this post I’ll be covering the relevant challenges, tips and benefits to .gov blog commenting.

You can easily find a slew of government blogs by typing into the Google search bar: “site: .gov blog” or more specifically “site: .gov business blog”.  This command tells Google to search for all the blog websites and end in .gov and that relate to business.  This simple tip would be great if you just wanted to read government blogs for leisure.  Trust me, that is not me.  As  marketers we want to participate in blog or forum commenting primarily for backlinks which in turn will boost our search engine ranking.

The main challenge and time-consuming task is finding .gov sites that are dofollow in nature.  Dofollow is just internet slang for a site not containing the “nofollow” tag in its source code.  You can find this out a couple ways.  I like using the SearchStatus Firefox add-on which can automatically highlight in red a page’s nofollow links.  The manual way is to review the source code by pressing control-U and then control-F to search for the term “nofollow”.  Finding  a nofollow tag inside the <a href=”website name”…> anchor text essentially means that your .gov site passes on no pagerank or “link juice” to your site and thus no value in Google’s eyes.

html showing no "nofollow" tag

You can individually sort through the thousands of .gov sites looking for the dofollow ones.  Or you can review the short list I included on my blog.  These are some of the one’s that I’ve used lately and that work.  However, I must caution you.  Spammers and comment generating computer programs should stay away.  Many of these sites still have comment moderators that can easily delete your comment.  While the topic may not identically match your given niche, be sure to demonstrate a personal, genuine touch.  Giving your honest opinion on a topic instead of leading with your affiliate link is the general rule of thumb.

Sample Forum Comment with Signature File

http://townhall.virginia.gov

http://community2.business.gov

http://ibis.wi.gov/CSForums

http://forums.info.usaid.gov/

http://web.aging.sc.gov/forums

Most of these sites require registration first.  Create a profile and a signature file (for comments) containing your web address.   Include your link in comments by using anchor text or your signature file.

You can confirm your dofollow backlinks by referencing the source codes which omit the nofollow tags.

Please comment below with other good ideas increase backlinks or other dofollow .gov blogs.

Related posts:

Social Bookmarking with Onlywire.

How to Use .Edu Blogs for Backlinks.

Why Long Tail Keywords Improve SEO.